Thoughts inspired by an Adventuress
Finally, I've finished reading Lawrence Miles' The Adventuress of Henrietta Street which I started a couple of weeks ago. No, it's not a slog to get through, just that I haven't had time to do much fictional reading recently, so after starting it, it sat around in a bag for a couple of weeks and then I finally got around to reading it yesterday and today while lazing around doing nothing much in particular. Anyway, it's prompted me off into a few thoughts on SF TV and where it's all going wrong. Even as I write those words, I'm aware that I'm straying into the territory that leads to either becoming Comic Book Guy or joining the Eltingville Club...
Quick capsule review: Excellent, and I really wish he'd try writing something other than Doctor Who (and now Faction Paradox) stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with them, just that it's a shame that a writer of his talent is only publishing stuff that's going to get a few thousand readers maximum. Or has he forced into doing it by some nefarious quota system that limits the number of active British SF writers whose surnames begin with M? Ken Macleod, China Mieville, Michael Marshall Smith (unless he avoids the quotas by being an S) - I could be on to something here. Or just on something. Your choice.
Or, what would be fun (and thus has almost no chance of happening) would be for the BBC to hire Miles as the main writer should they ever decide to bring Doctor Who back to TV. In this interview, he makes some interesting points about why the BBC will mess up any revival they try to bring about and in my opinion, it's a pretty accurate analysis. However, I'd add to it by saying that the BBC doesn't really know what it wants to do with Doctor Who, besides just treating it as a useful cash cow for BBC Worldwide. As long as it keeps selling books and videos, they're not inclined to tamper with it and are quite happy to let it trundle along for the next however many years until the remaining fan base is either completely saturated or dies off when it'll just disappear into obscurity.
Yes, they did attempt the Paul McGann revival in the 90s (though that was principally an American work) and I guess we ought to be glad they did that rather than go for one of the ideas described here. However, despite the atrociousness of those ideas, I believe that if they're ever going to bring it back, it needs to be a complete restart, wiping the slate clean of all that has gone before. Why? Because it'll piss off the fanboys (and girls).
One of the curses of the internet is that it's allowed people who would otherwise have done nothing much with their lives to set themselves up as little gods of a particular field. One of those areas has been what's known as 'fandom', where people with no real creative ability can set themselves up as 'continuity experts' - monitoring every episode of a particular TV series and then writing long detailed Usenet posts about how Character X's actions in an episode contradict some minor line of dialogue from four years ago and thus the writer of that episode is a talentless hack who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near ‘their’ series again. In short, the problem has become that fans now see themselves as the 'owners' of a series, rather than just the consumers. All very noble and democratic of course, but great art is never made by a committee, and the problem comes when the writers and producers start listening to 'the fans' and giving them what they want, which leads to every little bit of mystery being explained, every continuity 'error' being rectified and a series that eventually disappears up its own backside. Or, you just get Enterprise which starts up there and just keeps digging further in.
The problem stems from the fact that 'the fans' are only a small number of the people who actually watch the show. Even if there are 10,000 of them, that's still less than 1% of the several million people who watch the show and that 99% plus don't really care about continuity. Yes, they care about the 'big picture' continuity and would get pretty annoyed (or more likely, would just stop watching) if, say, Buffy started defeating vampires by using interpretive dance rather than wooden stakes, but they don't care about the little things the 'fans' get obsessed with because they don't recall it, and if they do, they don't care, because it's just a story.
Which brings me back to Doctor Who revivals - what the 'fans' forget, and Lawrence Miles seems to understand, is that outside of their little group, no one can remember the details of individual stories and plotlines. The reason any Who revival needs to go back to square one (I'd say Year One, but dates are always relative when you're talking about Time Lords) is because if it tries to carry on from where it left off, it's instantly saddling itself with forty years of continuity that no one outside of a small group knows or cares about. Various parts of Doctor Who have become iconic parts of modern British culture - people remember the Doctor, the TARDIS, the Daleks and a smattering of other enemies and companions (the exact details depend on their age, of course) but they don't remember much beyond that. More to the point, they don't remember or care that such-and-such an episode revealed an important fact about Time Lords or the internal politics of the Daleks, and if they're expected to remember that to watch and enjoy a new series they won't bother and will just turn to Footballer's Wives instead.
Iconic characters don't need to stay in a fixed continuity. Consider Superman as an example - the Christopher Reeve films are not continuations of the 50s TV series, Lois and Clark doesn't pick up the story from the end of the film and Smallville is yet another take on the same character. If audiences as a whole cared about continuity, then they wouldn't watch any of the 'new' series, as it conflicts with the 'original' story, yet people still watch them which shows that as long as the basic character of Superman/Clark Kent stays the same, the continuity isn't important.
So, it's time for the BBC to tell the fanboys to go away, give the keys of the universe to Lawrence Miles, tell him to start it all over from scratch and then sit back and enjoy the show.
And if, after this long post, you want something fun and related to read, this rather long interview with Lawrence Miles has some very good (and potentially libellous) stuff.
Finally, I've finished reading Lawrence Miles' The Adventuress of Henrietta Street which I started a couple of weeks ago. No, it's not a slog to get through, just that I haven't had time to do much fictional reading recently, so after starting it, it sat around in a bag for a couple of weeks and then I finally got around to reading it yesterday and today while lazing around doing nothing much in particular. Anyway, it's prompted me off into a few thoughts on SF TV and where it's all going wrong. Even as I write those words, I'm aware that I'm straying into the territory that leads to either becoming Comic Book Guy or joining the Eltingville Club...
Quick capsule review: Excellent, and I really wish he'd try writing something other than Doctor Who (and now Faction Paradox) stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with them, just that it's a shame that a writer of his talent is only publishing stuff that's going to get a few thousand readers maximum. Or has he forced into doing it by some nefarious quota system that limits the number of active British SF writers whose surnames begin with M? Ken Macleod, China Mieville, Michael Marshall Smith (unless he avoids the quotas by being an S) - I could be on to something here. Or just on something. Your choice.
Or, what would be fun (and thus has almost no chance of happening) would be for the BBC to hire Miles as the main writer should they ever decide to bring Doctor Who back to TV. In this interview, he makes some interesting points about why the BBC will mess up any revival they try to bring about and in my opinion, it's a pretty accurate analysis. However, I'd add to it by saying that the BBC doesn't really know what it wants to do with Doctor Who, besides just treating it as a useful cash cow for BBC Worldwide. As long as it keeps selling books and videos, they're not inclined to tamper with it and are quite happy to let it trundle along for the next however many years until the remaining fan base is either completely saturated or dies off when it'll just disappear into obscurity.
Yes, they did attempt the Paul McGann revival in the 90s (though that was principally an American work) and I guess we ought to be glad they did that rather than go for one of the ideas described here. However, despite the atrociousness of those ideas, I believe that if they're ever going to bring it back, it needs to be a complete restart, wiping the slate clean of all that has gone before. Why? Because it'll piss off the fanboys (and girls).
One of the curses of the internet is that it's allowed people who would otherwise have done nothing much with their lives to set themselves up as little gods of a particular field. One of those areas has been what's known as 'fandom', where people with no real creative ability can set themselves up as 'continuity experts' - monitoring every episode of a particular TV series and then writing long detailed Usenet posts about how Character X's actions in an episode contradict some minor line of dialogue from four years ago and thus the writer of that episode is a talentless hack who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near ‘their’ series again. In short, the problem has become that fans now see themselves as the 'owners' of a series, rather than just the consumers. All very noble and democratic of course, but great art is never made by a committee, and the problem comes when the writers and producers start listening to 'the fans' and giving them what they want, which leads to every little bit of mystery being explained, every continuity 'error' being rectified and a series that eventually disappears up its own backside. Or, you just get Enterprise which starts up there and just keeps digging further in.
The problem stems from the fact that 'the fans' are only a small number of the people who actually watch the show. Even if there are 10,000 of them, that's still less than 1% of the several million people who watch the show and that 99% plus don't really care about continuity. Yes, they care about the 'big picture' continuity and would get pretty annoyed (or more likely, would just stop watching) if, say, Buffy started defeating vampires by using interpretive dance rather than wooden stakes, but they don't care about the little things the 'fans' get obsessed with because they don't recall it, and if they do, they don't care, because it's just a story.
Which brings me back to Doctor Who revivals - what the 'fans' forget, and Lawrence Miles seems to understand, is that outside of their little group, no one can remember the details of individual stories and plotlines. The reason any Who revival needs to go back to square one (I'd say Year One, but dates are always relative when you're talking about Time Lords) is because if it tries to carry on from where it left off, it's instantly saddling itself with forty years of continuity that no one outside of a small group knows or cares about. Various parts of Doctor Who have become iconic parts of modern British culture - people remember the Doctor, the TARDIS, the Daleks and a smattering of other enemies and companions (the exact details depend on their age, of course) but they don't remember much beyond that. More to the point, they don't remember or care that such-and-such an episode revealed an important fact about Time Lords or the internal politics of the Daleks, and if they're expected to remember that to watch and enjoy a new series they won't bother and will just turn to Footballer's Wives instead.
Iconic characters don't need to stay in a fixed continuity. Consider Superman as an example - the Christopher Reeve films are not continuations of the 50s TV series, Lois and Clark doesn't pick up the story from the end of the film and Smallville is yet another take on the same character. If audiences as a whole cared about continuity, then they wouldn't watch any of the 'new' series, as it conflicts with the 'original' story, yet people still watch them which shows that as long as the basic character of Superman/Clark Kent stays the same, the continuity isn't important.
So, it's time for the BBC to tell the fanboys to go away, give the keys of the universe to Lawrence Miles, tell him to start it all over from scratch and then sit back and enjoy the show.
And if, after this long post, you want something fun and related to read, this rather long interview with Lawrence Miles has some very good (and potentially libellous) stuff.
Nick got away with this at 2:03 AM
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